In the fall of 2018, translator Anne Posten told me about a German book she had fallen in love with, about oil rig workers, male intimacy, the nature of memory, and the cost of freedom. I begged her to send me the pages she had translated that same night and was bowled over from the very first sentence. Two years later, I had the honor of publishing at Catapult Anja Kampmann’s debut novel, High as the Waters Rise, in Anne’s translation, which promptly became a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in Translated Literature.
High as the Waters Rise is the story of Waclaw, a man who grew up in a German mining town and has been working on oil platforms across the world for twelve years. When Waclaw loses his closest companion in an accident on the rig, he must embark on a journey of grief and reckoning.
Of course we all depend on the oil industry, even if the workers who run it are invisible to us. This novel makes that exploitation not only visible but intimate and personal. It is a politically urgent story, exploring the problems of a globalized capitalist society. But more than anything, it is the story of one man who stands at the margins of that society, asking what his life is worth.
Before we published it here, High as the Waters Rise had already been well received in Germany, where it won several awards and was nominated for the German Book Prize. But international literature in English translation, particularly by debut authors, must find passionate champions in order to succeed. We were thrilled when the novel found such a champion in author, critic, and translator Jennifer Croft, who alongside author Olga Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights.
Below, Jennifer discusses with Anja and Anne the translation process, its challenges and intimate nature, and what it means to translate a person into another language. I hope that their conversation might inspire you to read High as the Waters Rise, which Jennifer Croft has said contains “prose with the brightness of poetry, in a splendidly lucid translation.”
—Kendall Storey, Editor & Foreign Rights Manager, Catapult
Jennifer Croft (JC): How did you two meet and come to this project? How did you decide to work together? Anne, maybe you could also speak a bit about how you generally choose your translation projects.
Anja Kampmann (AK): Anne and I met years ago when I was a fellow at the International Writing Program in Iowa. We’ve been in touch ever since, as she developed her professional career as a translator and I wrote a book of poetry and High as the Waters Rise. But I never expected her to do the translation for High as the Waters Rise, just because I respect her so much in her own work. I couldn’t believe it when Anne told me that she had fallen in love with the novel and wanted to translate it. Her translation sample was wonderful and she caught the spirit and rhythm of the book right away.
Anne Posten (AP): In a way, High as the Waters Rise has been a long time in the making. Anja and I met in 2010. I had just moved to New York to start grad school at Queens College and still felt a bit like a country mouse in the big city. A mutual friend knew Anja wanted to come to New York after her time at the International Writers’ Program in Iowa and asked me if I wouldn’t mind hosting her. I said yes. Luckily, Anja and I became fast friends, and we still cherish memories from that time when we were both discovering the city and getting to know each other. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and over the course of these ten years, I fell in love with and started translating Anja’s poetry and visited her several times in Germany. In that time she published her first poetry collection and I my first book-length translations, and then Anja’s debut novel Wie hoch die Wasser steigen came out, to great success in Germany. I was thrilled for her, and entranced by the text. It was amazing to be so familiar with Anja’s poetry and then see, like magic, that same voice and style turned into a novel. I did a sample translation and wrote a long report on the novel, which I sent out to almost all of the editors I know, plus some I didn’t. There was a lot of initial interest and then, much to my surprise and dismay, radio silence. I was feeling pretty frustrated when I ran into Kendall unexpectedly on a trip to New York in November 2018 and heard that she’d started working for Catapult. When we met for drinks, Kendall asked if there was anything I might want to pitch her. I told her about the book and she was immediately intrigued. I sent her my sample and report, and the rest is history. I can still hardly believe it all worked out so perfectly—getting to work on a book I care so much about, written by a friend, and edited by someone I respect, like, and trust so much as Kendall.
AK: Yes, it felt like a perfect match. Also, it was great to have a friend by my side for the American translation, after almost five years I spent writing the book.
JC: Your experience working on High as the Waters Rise really brings out the importance of the connectedness of human beings in both the translation process and the publishing process. That is, you didn’t only work with words here—you also interacted with people with whom you felt a real affinity. Has that been the case for your other translation projects to date?
AP: Yes and no. This experience has certainly been an anomaly: almost all of my other books have come to me, rather than I to them. And I’ve not previously had such a close and appreciative relationship with an editor and publishing team. On the other hand, I never feel like I’m just working with words. I don’t think about translation as conveying simply the words inside a book, but rather the book as a whole, as a product of the person and culture that made it, and that effort also has to be supported by a group of people on the other side: those who help the book come to be and those who read it.
AK: That’s probably the biggest achievement for a reader, when you can really dive deep into a story and connect all the smaller motifs and stories embedded within it. When a reader manages all of this, even the strange world of a rig worker can feel familiar. Suddenly you have empathy for this stranger.
JC: Anne, can you give an example from High as the Waters Rise where you translated not the meaning of the individual words, or even the sentence they made up, but rather the book as a whole, or Anja as a person?
AP: I applied this really more as an attitude than as a technique. When I read a sentence in Wie hoch die Wasser steigen, my primary thought is: How can I make a sentence in English that will sound like that? And, at the same time, that will also sound like English? A sentence that too radically departs from the expectations of English writing is unlikely to sound beautiful, to me or anyone else. German style is more accepting of a string of actions, images, or even clauses set next to each other and separated by commas. Anja exploits this, both because she’s a poet, and because it suits the emotional tumult of the main character and mirrors the whirlwind of stimuli and memories that he experiences. English style tends to get nervous when there aren’t conjunctions to tell us precisely how items are related to each other, or at least strong punctuation to keep things neatly separated. I happen to find comma splices in English very lovely, but if I were to use exactly the same commas as Anja does in my text, it wouldn’t sound very beautiful. There’s a paragraph very early on, for example:
This wasn’t Mexico, and the men were tired and high-strung when they got to land. A piece of luggage came flying through the air, a bag, big as a porpoise or a stuffed boar, Hey Budapest. Mátyás had only just raised his arms when the bag crashed on the floor in front of him, his curls bounced. They looked at each other for a moment, Hey, Texas, before the huge mountain of flesh came to him and wrapped him in an embrace.
So much happens in that paragraph, and I hope it feels that way in English—a little overwhelming, quick, blurry, but with a solid and pleasing rhythm. The original also had a solid rhythm, but it was a single sentence. In this particular instance, I don’t think it would have worked the same way in English: the rhythm would have gotten lost and felt out of control. This is a fairly dramatic example: I love Anja’s long sentences and there were many instances where the rhythm could be created in English in a similar way as in the German, with a lot of commas.
On translating a person: I think it’s important for me not to confuse Anja’s work with Anja, my friend! I have a close relationship with both of them. But my understanding of a word or image in Anja’s language is based on my years of experience reading and translating her texts, rather than my years of experience spending time with her. The “person” I felt I translated in the book was Waclaw, whose consciousness is very close to Anja’s poetic world, but not to Anja. Over the course of the book, I got to know Waclaw better and better, which means I started to understand why a memory might present itself to him as a certain image, for example, or why an analogy might be repeated in different situations.
AK: I have the same impression; for me it was very important to step back, behind the text, in order to make visible what was in the story. It was not about me, although I and a lot of people might share some of Waclaw’s experiences. There’s some kind of freedom to be achieved by reading and writing literature that takes place outside yourself—something that’s not just leading back to the author or her biography. I needed this freedom to write what I wanted to write, and Anne needed it to shape and give rhythm to her translation.
I really feel that Anne did such a beautiful job, and also I know, of course, about the difficulties that come with the text. Translating this novel was not just about getting it right––rather, Anne needed to translate the atmosphere as well. She had to translate the experience of someone who really tried hard to start a new life and got lost on the way, the world of someone who cannot really share his life anymore and cannot really find words for the things he is most concerned about. As you’re seeing through Waclaw’s eyes, you understand how he is just by the descriptions or the tone of the language. Anne didn’t need me in order to figure this out, and I’m so happy that the things I care for in the text are now being transformed into English. It’s a different ship on the same ocean—the ocean is the world of Waclaw, everything he’s been through, all the things and people he comes across.
JC: Anja, what was it like undertaking the translation process with Anne?
AK: I really feel that Anne managed to transform the musicality of the text into the English language. There are so many motives and patterns woven into the text––it’s like a piece of music with a lot of layers, and for the translation of this one needs to be very sensitive towards this structure, which is both a structure of memory and time as well as emotion. The story of Waclaw is told in so many micro-memories, so many places and time-layers, and language and the music of it is very important to connect all these images—it’s really rather miraculous to me that a reader will now be able to have that experience in English.
Anne and I have of course become friends, and I admire her profound knowledge of German and her understanding of literature in general, but I did not at all expect her to translate anything for me, as I have a feeling that she really just works on (and should work on) the books and texts she chooses, and I wouldn’t have it the other way.
As for the translation process, when I was writing the book, I did a lot of research, traveling to Morocco, Italy, and Hungary and getting deep into the world of drilling, oil rigs, roughnecks, platforms, helicopters, and all the technical aspects of drilling oil. I learned about mud, chemicals, moon pools, kellys and cranes, and the twelve hour-shifts and injuries workers on the rigs experience. When I wrote High as the Waters Rise, it was sometimes difficult to find German terms for these, as this world mainly exists in English. But for Anne, this meant that she also had to learn about the routines out there and to find the correct names for everything related to drilling. That made a lot of work for her in the background, and I remember conversations in which we would send each other photographs or technical sketches to get the correct English term for each detail.
And there’s something else which is difficult to find words for: I think the book offers a very “warm” view on Waclaw, even though he really is not a nice guy all the time, but this warmth is something that I can absolutely recognize when reading Anne’s translation. So apart from all the technical aspects, I think Anne really has a feeling for the world described. Her English is warm and beautiful, and I think the readers can really lean into it and trust in it.
AP: Anja, it’s fascinating that you say Waclaw isn’t such a nice guy. You do indeed treat him with such empathy that it never even occurred to me to think about him in a judgmental way—whether what he’s doing is right or wrong, kind or selfish, though those are questions that are usually at the top of my mind for people or characters. I think this points to another aspect of the book that I find really compelling, which is its connection of systematic realities and problems to a single, personal story. The way Waclaw’s expectations, dreams, feelings, and actions are shaped by the economic pressures he faces, the culture he grew up in, and then the necessities and constraints of his profession is drawn so vividly that it makes him really coherent and sympathetic. This is a great achievement—creating such intimacy with a character that I can’t say I really identify with in any way—how could I?—and writing a story that I think makes strong statements about the world we live in today without ever feeling political or moralizing.
German poet Anja Kampmann was born in Hamburg and resides in Leipzig. High as the Waters Rise is her first novel, for which she received the Mara Cassens Prize for best German debut novel and the Lessing Promotion Prize. She was also awarded the Bergen-Enkheim Prize, nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the German Book Prize, and was named a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In 2020 she was also awarded the Rainer Malkowski Prize by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts for her work/oevre. Her second collection of poetry “The dog is always hungry” will be published in spring 2021.
Anne Posten translates prose, poetry, and drama from the German. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, and her translations of authors such as Peter Bichsel, Carl Seelig, Thomas Brasch, Tankred Dorst, Anna Katharina Hahn, and Paul Scheerbart have appeared with New Directions, Christine Burgin/The University of Chicago Press, Music & Literature, n+1, VICE, The Buenos Aires Review, FIELD, Stonecutter, and Hanging Loose, among other publications. She is based in Berlin.
Jennifer Croft won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her memoir Homesick and the Man Booker International Prize for her translation from Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Her other translations include Romina Paula’s August, Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She is also the author of Serpientes y escaleras and Notes on Postcards, and she holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University and an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: